This is my entry for the Yuletide Flash Fiction Challenge at PanErotica - "The challenge is to write a short story of no more than 600 words. The only other rule is your story must begin with the following first line: The lights appeared out of the darkness.

The lights appeared out of the darkness, a score of candles dancing in the unnerving stillness of the night, fixed to a small pine tree that had been set up on the parapet of the enemy trenches some seventy yards away. There was still some sporadic gunfire and the dull thud of shelling in the distance, but along this stretch the artillery had fallen silent on both sides of the line. Instead, the still night air carried voices across the span of barbed wire and mud: snatches of laughter and shouts, bursts of singing drifting across the stilled battlefield.

The stench of rotting and unwashed bodies, stagnant mud and cordite was little better above ground than in the trench, but he lifted his face to the night sky and breathed deeply anyway. After weeks of cloud and rain, it was a clear moonlit night. On the enemy side, he could see small groups of men emerging from the parapet, and behind him, his comrades were singing carols of their own.

The two sides met among the bodies of their fallen comrades in the open ground between the trench lines. They were cautious of the extraordinary and unexpected truce at first, but soon small souvenirs were being offered and accepted. Hands were shaken, buttons snipped from greatcoats and exchanged, tobacco swapped for chocolate.

“Ein Licht für Ihre Zigarette, Tommy?”

He glanced round to find an enemy officer, a lieutenant of some kind, grinning at him, holding up a brass lighter and miming lighting a smoke. He accepted with a nod and leaned over to let the tip of his woodbine touch the offered flame cupped in the officer’s hand. The brief flare of light illuminated the grime ingrained into the skin, the broken and bitten nails, and for a moment he felt a powerful sense of intimacy with this stranger.

“Thank you, danke,” he straightened up and exhaled a lungful of smoke, gazing at the face of his deadly enemy.

Not the sadistic and cold-blooded devil that propaganda would have him believe, but a man just like him, young with ancient eyes that had seen too many atrocities. It was hard to sustain hatred for a man who shared the same grim and brutal reality.

He offered a cigarette from his battered case, which was cheerfully accepted. Tomorrow they would go back to trying to kill each other, but tonight was a different country.

“Für Sie, behalten Sie es.” When he shook his head, not understanding, the officer reached out and took his hand, pressing the brass lighter into it. The metal was smooth and still warm from his enemy’s touch. Turning it over, he saw there was a name engraved into it but it was illegible in the dark.

In return he gave the cigarette case. It was heavily dented now and the silver tarnished, but the officer grinned and seemed pleased by the exchange. From the pocket of his greatcoat he produced a small flask of schnapps and they toasted each other in the temporary peace of no man’s land.

“Fröhliche Weihnachten, Tommy.”

“Merry Christmas, Jerry.”